Production of hydrocarbons particularly from remote or marginal oil and gas fields offshore is proving to be of significant importance to oil companies, and the economies of some oil producing countries. The larger oil discoveries are now in the minority, and are in many instances starting to, or are, suffering a production bottleneck caused by high water production rates. It is the economic field life extension of these and the development of the smaller reserves of recoverable oil, particularly in deep water, or a long distance from any other facilities, that creates the need for a new generation compact separator.
To continue to produce or bring into production such fields in an economically and environmentally secure method, it would be beneficial to separate the bulk of any produced water, particularly when the field has entered its water continuous phase, either at the front-end of the separation process on the surface or on the sea bed. The majority of unwanted by-products from the oil well, such as the produced water and solids, will need to be managed by either discharge to the environment whilst meeting the rules in place for doing so, or by reinjection into a disposal or pressure maintenance zone in the vicinity of the producing well, in some cases solids may have to be transported to the shore for treatment and disposal. All of this must be achieved whilst managing large intermittent volumes of the gas, solids, oil and water, known in the industry as “slugs”. It has been the management of these slugs that has historically used large pressure vessels with a three minute or more retention or hold up time, or slug inhibition methods to smooth out this intermittent or slugging flow.